Get your stakes in the ground early
It’s easy to have a few of these and then come to the conclusion that you’re damned if you do and you’re damned if you don’t. But, I promise, your coworkers aren’t trying to make your life difficult.
It also doesn’t mean that you should have been able to create a perfect design in a vacuum. We’ll it’s unlikely.
What is going on here?
Typically people aren’t going to imagine all of the various things they don’t think should happen. When first presented with the information they legitimately didn’t have opinions. While some folks, if they spend some time would give some useful input, realistically you still won’t get a lot until there’s a proposal on the table.
It’s easier to look at a specific proposal and find gaps and potential issues. It’s not just more efficient for them (to not give all feedback on an infinite set of potential approaches), you can make it more efficient for yourself too.
How often have you seen a spec or design that solves a truly complex issue not get any feedback? I certainly haven’t. However, I’ve seen many folks invest huge amounts of time and effort trying to please the group. Usually this leads to wasted time and sadness when there are still questions and feedback.
So, what’s an engineer to do?
My recommendation is to follow the stakes in the ground model. Essentially you want to tentatively make the key decisions and then get input. It’s about creating a rough framing of the problem and the initial proposed solution. It’s enough for people to understand the direction you are thinking and concrete options for them to provide feedback on.
With this approach you haven’t overly invested so the new information is highly valuable and early enough to influence significant changes. At the same time the work you did do makes it easier for those who are contributing.
Once you get the initial feedback or signoff, you can go further down the design path and know that you are less likely to get blindsided with derailing opinions. It also allows you to include the input from others in usually the same amount of time had you tried to do it all on your own. But now folks have been brought along.
For more complex situation you can have a few rounds of stakes in the ground where things are moved as needed until the basics are figured out.
Bonus tip, add a faq to track why those stakes are where they are and what information would cause you to need to rethink it. That way if more information comes up later you have a trigger to check if things need adjusting and others can get up to speed if they join part way through.
